Weekly Wrap: Finance company news dominates headlines

Finance company news continues to dominate the headlines this week. However, we are pleased to report a good old managed fund story was our pick of the news today.

Friday, September 14th 2007, 4:42PM

Morningstar has started rolling out its qualitative research on managers, releasing reports on international share funds from ING and AXA/Alliance. The reports are useful reads written in an easy to read style. For the record, both funds get a good wrap from the researcher.

This week we also had the latest household savings indicators. As we know the property market and house price increases are largely driving New Zealanders' increased wealth. Some may think that a slowing housing market may make people have second thoughts before entering the property market. Arcus chief economist Rozanna Wozniak takes a different view.

For readers interested in the property market I would recommend you visit Landlords.co.nz. This site has lots of information, also it has a statistics section which has all the latest house price sales data and rental information, plus you can do graphs comparing data.

Finance companies
Of all the stories in this space, two stand out this week. One is the government's decision to put non-bank deposit takers under a new regulatory regime, and the other is the coverage of Geneva Finance.

The mini frenzy over Geneva Finance is something I am sure the company hasn't liked. It all started when S&P put the company onto its creditwatch negative status, meaning that it was under review and likely to get downgraded.

Geneva, which is a mid-sized company, has had a disproportionately large amount of coverage in the papers with one running a big item in the general news sector. No doubt this sort of coverage will further undermine investors' confidence.

To its credit Geneva appears to be well-run, it has a wholesale bank funding line, and it has responded well to the publicity being open about the status of the business.

The regulatory changes, on the face of it, look good. This is a story we will look into a little bit more for readers.

Recently we ran a survey of advisers asking about their attitudes to fixed interest investments and finance companies. Results of this survey will be on the site very soon.

The other useful investment story is ANZ's submission to the Parliament's Finance and Expenditure select committee, where it argued for changes to the make up of default funds. You can read the bank's comments here.

The big economic news of the week was yesterday's OCR announcement from the Reserve Bank. We have coverage of that, what it means for home loan rates, plus news of the Mortgage Broker of the Year Awards all in our Mortgage Centre.

Amongst the new appointments this week we have the appointment of a former AXA manager to Mercers, a new role and location for one of Tower's business development managers and some news on a new role for former ING CIO David McClatchy.

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